Anthropic's Mythos 5 Partially Restored to 100+ US Partners After Two-Week Export Control Blackout

[Ava82]

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick informed Anthropic on June 26 that a license is no longer required to export, reexport or in-country transfer the Claude Mythos 5 model to entities named in an annex of trusted partners, ending a two-week blackout that had forced the company to suspend access to both Mythos 5 and its public-facing sibling Fable 5 worldwide. The original order, issued June 12, invoked national security export controls after security researchers demonstrated a jailbreak technique that reportedly involved asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix software flaws, a method that concerned officials could unlock Mythos 5's advanced cybersecurity vulnerability-discovery capabilities. Because Anthropic had no way to filter access by nationality across its global customer base, the company took both models offline entirely rather than risk non-compliance.

Lutnick's letter states that Anthropic's engagement with the government yielded significant progress and that the company has committed to work with federal officials on protocols and standards for future model releases, though the letter does not elaborate on what those protocols will involve. Access under the new arrangement is limited to roughly 100 vetted US companies and federal agencies operating and defending critical infrastructure, a list the Commerce Department has not made public. Fable 5, the publicly available consumer-facing version, remains offline with no confirmed restoration timeline, though people close to the talks describe restoration as the direction discussions are heading.

The episode unfolded against a backdrop of separate, ongoing friction between Anthropic and the Trump administration. The Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk in March after contract talks over military use guardrails broke down, and the company's lawsuit challenging that designation remains unresolved. Reports that parts of the National Security Agency lost Mythos access following the June 12 order, and that NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd had described the model as breaking into classified systems during testing, generated widespread speculation before officials clarified the comments referred to authorised red-team testing conducted through Anthropic's Project Glasswing programme rather than an unauthorised intrusion. Commerce spokesman Benno Kass characterised the two-week resolution timeline as evidence the government can move quickly to address security concerns while preserving American AI leadership, a framing that establishes, for the first time, a formal trusted-partner access tier sitting between full public release and complete suspension for frontier AI models.

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